Dennis Hopper, whose pot-addled Billy in Easy Rider and psychopathic Frank Booth inBlue Velvet helped put the icon in iconoclastic, has died after a decade-long battle with prostate cancer. He was 74.

Taken ill with flu-like symptomslast September, Hopper later said he was suffering with prostate cancer.

Born in Dodge City, Kansas – his father, Jay Hopper, reputedly was an intelligence officer in the pre-CIA Office of Strategic Services, which explained his son’s peripatetic American upbringing – Hopper was 19 when he was cast in his very first movie opposite none other than James Dean: 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause. Hopper played a character named “Goon.”